How to Use Photo Mode in Satisfactory 1.1

Satisfactory 1.1 is officially out on the Experimental branch, and while there are plenty of bugs and issues (hence the Experimental aspect), one part that works great is the new Photo Mode, which has actually already received some quality of life improvements since the initial launch of Experimental. While not a gameplay feature, Photo Mode is already proving to be a popular way for players to enhance their screenshots. But photo mode has quite a few settings, and it can be a little overwhelming. So as an amateur photographer and photo editor myself, I figured why not go through each of the settings and explain what they do and how they relate to a real-world camera and photo editing tool.

Now, since this is in Experimental at this moment, check the pinned comment of the video version of this post, where I will note any updates or changes that contradict or add to what I cover here.

WATCH THE VIDEO VERSION HERE:

Photo Mode Basics

So to access photo mode, press P. You won’t see any detailed settings at first, but as you can see some hotkeys at the bottom. Left mouse button takes a photo if all you wanted to do was take a screenshot.

You can also enable decoupled camera by pressing R, which allows you to detach the camera from the pioneer and fly around.

The default mode is to follow the normal view you get from the pioneer’s first-person perspective, and moving the pioneer around will therefore move the camera. But decoupled mode gives you a free-moving camera. You still use the regular WASD keys to move it around, Space and C to go up and down, and the mouse to look around. You can also use Shift to fly faster. The distance you can get from the pioneer is totally reasonable for a photo mode and will let you take whatever screenshot you’re going for, and props to Coffee Stain for increasing the range from the initial distance, which was way too short.

You can also hide the UI by pressing T, in case you want to screen-record.

Additionally, you can press F to focus, but until we start adjusting other settings, this won’t do anything by default.

Photo Mode - Camera Settings

So now let’s follow the hotkey to press Tab to show settings.

Here the first setting is to change the camera mode between first person and decoupled, again.

Next is Zoom. This one explains itself and was actually the only setting from the old photo mode, though this zoom allows you to drag a bar or set an exact number in addition to using the scroll wheel.

Next is roll, which just rolls the camera in either direction so you can get that famous dutch angle.

Aperture is probably the most fun setting that will result in cool and cinematic screenshots. Now if you don’t know anything about cameras, you may be familiar with the word Aperture from Portal, with the company Aperture Science. And their logo is a camera aperture. Basically this is an opening that controls how much light is allowed to enter a camera lens. Normally this effects exposure and depth of field, but in-game it seems to only affect depth of field, which makes sense since it isn’t a real camera that’s constrained by silly laws of physics.

On cameras, Aperture is usually represented by a F with a slash and then a number. In the case of the game it looks like they just went with a number, which for sure makes it less confusing, and the number does seem to match real-world aperture, so if you’re a photographer this should feel somewhat natural. The numbering system is slightly confusing though, for non-photographers. A bigger number means an aperture is small and more closed, and a small number indicates a large and wide open aperture. This is because they actually represent fractions rather than whole numbers. Anyways, this could be an an entire post talking about the math of aperture, as it’s fairly complex, but that’s not the point of this guide, and it’s not actually important for understanding Photo Mode.

Satisfactory’s aperture starts at 24, which indicates a very small aperture with a very wide depth of field with almost everything in focus. This tracks, as it’s clearly the default view for the game, where there isn’t any built in depth-of-field. But while the average lens usually tops out at 2.8 or 1.4, Satisfactory goes all the way to 0.001, which uhhhhh… yeah… You’re probably not going to use that. The lowest practical aperture is about 1, and even that is only for very up-close images. But still, the impossibly small aperture values are really nice and can make some very interesting screenshots.

Focus Mode changes between manual focus, autofocus, and Tracking. Manual focus requires you to set the focus manually using a slider. You can also press the Set button to automatically move the slider to a focus point that the center of the camera is looking at. Autofocus will, well, automatically focus the camera based on what the center point is looking at, and will adjust as you move. The third mode, tracking, allows you to click the Set button when the center point is aimed at something, and then the camera will continually adjust the focus so that no matter where you move, that point is always in focus.

Combine aperture adjustments with setting focus to get the best results. For example, you may mess with the aperture and get a blurry mess, but by setting the focus to the right distance or object you can focus very specifically on your desired subject and achieve your desired look.

Below is grid, which cycles through various grids. These can be useful for centering your subject, or otherwise balancing what’s in your shot, but rest assured that they won’t show up in your final screenshot.

Next is crop, which will automatically crop your image to a certain aspect ratio. Meanwhile the overlay still shows the rest of the game, just darkened. This can be useful for getting cinematic ultrawide images or taking a vertical image for a phone background.

Photo Mode - Image Settings

So those are all of the settings that you might find in a camera, but the Image tab includes the settings that you might find and adjust in editing software after taking the photo. Adjusting these settings in-game gives you a lot more control, though.

The first category is Color Correction.

Exposure is kind of like brightness, but while brightness would lift the brightness of everything in the image, exposure tends to start by blowing out the highlights, or the whitest parts of the image, first. In terms of Satisfactory screenshots, this can help brighten a shot and get more detail out of a darker scene.

Saturation will universally lift the colors in the image, or bring them down and close to black and white. Less is more with increasing saturation, as it doesn’t take much to make colors pop. I am also holding out hope that we get a Vibrance control as well. Vibrance only boosts less-saturated colors in a photo, which allows you to add more color to an image without absolutely burning your retinas.

Contrast can go up or down from center. Contrast essentially controls the difference in brightness and color between the lightest and darkest parts of an image. Dropping it all the way down will make your image a grey mass, while spiking it all the way up will create an image that feels jagged and deep-fried. Both are generally undesirable, so you’ll likely be making small adjustments to help make your subject stand out, or to blend things together. This is one of most powerful settings in photography for evoking a certain mood, as it can change an image from soft to hard, so to speak.

Tint controls the color tint of the image. While you can use this to essentially put a color filter over your image, its intended purpose is for White Balance, or correcting an image that is too far into one color and painting the whole image in a way that you don’t desire. You can use it to adjust the feel and mood of the image to your taste though.

Color Filter cycles through several different, well, color filters. These are essentially Instagram filters. There are presets like sepia, vibrant, Orange and Teal, and various vintage and stylistic filters.

The Color Filter Strength will adjust how strongly the color filter is applied, in case you want a stronger or more subtle look.

The next category is Effects Settings. This is positioned after Color Correction, because in digital photo editing, you want to get your base image to a good state through adjustments like exposure and tint, then apply more drastic effects once you’ve improved that initial picture.

So the first setting here is Effect Filter, which lets you cycle between some of the effects you can apply. There are some really cool and dramatic ones, and I think most people are going to get the most out of applying these effects and probably not doing much else. Because these change the image quite a lot, like with Comic or VHS.

Below that you can adjust how strongly the effect is applied.

Bloom adjusts how much lights shine. You might not realize just how many lights there are on factory machines until you start increasing the bloom, because oh boy are there a lot of lights on these bad boys. However, increasing this can give a very cinematic feel to your screenshots and combines nicely with a good blur.

Now we’re getting real weird! Aberration is the separation of the red, blue, and green layers of the image, and offsetting them with this slider can cause a glitchy or fuzzy looking image. Definitely not something you’ll use often, but it’ll be really cool when you do, perhaps combined with the VHS filter.

Vignette creates a dark oval shadow that starts on the outside edges of the screen and works its way inward as you increase the slider. A small amount of vignette can be useful for drawing the viewer’s eye to your subject and taking attention off of the background. Less is often more, and the best kind of vignette is one that is basically imperceptible.

Finally is grain, which will add an old-school film grain to the image and help make it look vintage and like it was taken on a film camera.

Photo Mode - Pioneer Settings

Now if you’ve decoupled your camera from the pioneer, you’ll see a third tab pop up, titled Pioneer. As you move the camera away you’ll see your pioneer.

Which is why the first setting is pose. And boy are there a ton of poses, including all the emotes that are already in the game.

But if you don’t want your pioneer getting in the way, you can press the hide button to hide them.

If you do want the pioneer getting in the way you can cause their neck to cursedly jerk toward the camera with the Look Into Camera button! As cursed as it can look, this is actually useful to getting a good pose with the pioneer while also getting the angle you want.

Next is the positioning category, with lets you rotate or nudge the pioneer from inside the camera view if you couldn’t get them just right from the normal first person perspective.

Photo Mode - Dolly Settings

Another button that appears when you decouple the camera is Dolly Settings. “Dolly” is a filmmaking term that refers to a shot where a camera is mounted on a wheeled cart that is itself often on tracks, and is able to move forward, backward, or sideways smoothly. Since Satisfactory is a video game, we have access to a magical flying dolly, which is awfully convenient.

Essentially how a dolly works in this game is that the camera will move between a set start and end point. The motion will include any horizontal, vertical, or rotational changes it needs to make to transition from one to the other. When you have moved the camera to your desired starting point, press the Set Start Point button, then move around until you’ve found a good ending point, and press the Set End Point button. Don’t worry about what you do in between. This isn’t like setting up a truck route in the game. There are no nodes in between these two points, only the two points themselves, and the camera will happily clip through whatever it needs to to find the most efficient route between point A and point B. Once you’ve saved both points, you can press the Play button. It might not start at the beginning though, so you can press the Back button on the left to bring it back to the start. Regardless, the animation will play endlessly back and forth until you stop it, which does allow you to see this movement in both forward and reverse.

Now likely, the shot will not look like how you wanted. I’d be willing to bet that the shot is either too fast or too abrupt. If the problem is with where the camera travels, your best bet is just to reset your start or end point. Don’t worry, the start and end points aren’t cleared until you override them, so if you change one, then the other will remain the same, allowing you to make adjustments and iterate.

The first setting to adjust your dolly motion is duration. The default is 5 seconds, and you can adjust it from 2 seconds to 40 seconds. The longer the time, the slower the motion. 5 seconds will likely be too short if you’ve set up a long-distance movement.

Lock On To Tracking Point is a toggle that allows you to set a tracking point.

Set Tracking Point will be enabled if you turn that on, and it will give you access to a button that says “Set”. Clicking “Set” on a point will set that as the tracking point for your dolly shot, and will cause the camera to always look at this point while it is moving between two points. This allows you to specifically highlight and rotate around an object of interest. If you set the tracking point along the path of the dolly, it will abruptly flip the camera 180 degrees so that it looks back at the point, which is kind of funny.

Blend Camera Settings is a bit weird, and I feel like I’m misinterpreting it. While not watching a dolly animation, toggling it on or off does nothing. While a dolly animation is playing, toggling it on seems to reset your camera settings back to their defaults and prevents you from changing them during the animation, but turning it back off again doesn’t restore them. However, you can still change Image settings, just not Camera settings.

Interpolation means a couple of different things in video, so it’s a bit of an odd word choice perhaps, but what it’s referring to specifically is keyframe interpolation, or filling in data between two known points. What the interpolation setting does is decide what sort of animation curve is applied to the dolly motion. You might think of this is a transition, which is maybe what I would have called it, but just know it’s referring to animation.

Linear interpolation is the default and it means your animation will very harshly move from start to end. Objects in nature don’t tend to move like this, so it often feels unnatural for a movement to have no acceleration. That’s why we might want to use a different type of interpolation.

There are two animation options to achieve a smoother result, those being Eases and Expo, and they can be In, Out, or both. In refers to the beginning of the shot, and Out refers to the end of a shot.

An ease is an animation that starts slow then ramps up to a faster speed.

Expo is short for exponential, and creates an exponential curve with its animation. An expo animation starts slow, then greatly speeds up.

To sum it up, linear is abrupt but consistent, ease smoothly ramps in and out, and spends more time the middle of the animation, while expo ramps smoothly in and out, but spends more time on the transition than what’s in the middle. Each has its own use case to create a unique movement.

No matter which you use, you can hide the UI with T and use external screen recording software to record your movement.

Finally to see your screenshots, you can click on the Screenshots Folder button, which will automatically open the folder on your computer.

Conclusion

So that is the new Photo Mode in Satisfactory. This is for Experimental, as it stands currently, but if any other major changes happen I will put a note in the pinned comment, so if you’re seeing this far in the future, check the comments for any corrections or additions.

If you enjoyed this tutorial and want more like it, feel free to subscribe to Satisfactor News on YouTube, and give the video a Like so I know you found it useful. Have fun taking your photos, and I can’t wait to see them on social media.